Dear At, Tricia and Organlearners,
I'm sorry I haven't been more active in the past few weeks, nor have I
answered the msgs addressed to me. What has happened is that I have to
organize and coordinate, in theory and practice, a course in creative
writing and was feeling that I was evolving so rapidly in thinking and
concept that I was not going to be able to converge and organize my
thoughts in time unless I stopped for a bit. Sorry, it's going to take a
little bit longer still.
I couldn't, however, let pass two msgs, from At and Tricia on Compassion.
At described a situation where his temper was tested facing a very
aggressive in-keeper. Doing what most of us would have done, he exercised
control and ended turning his anger against himself and not the in-keeper.
I know I would have done the same and would have paid the consequences,
but... it is far from peaceful any judgement on the subject and i guess
only At knows what he feels about it. Right, At?
At, you say:
> Dear fellow learners. What is this "kind organisation" which will have
> to resque us should our tyres get flat as a result of fleeing from what
> we
> hate in our civilisation?
>
> Fill in the [.......].
I have to answer that we are never safe from the risks we take and that
our own organization is the only one which can really rescue us.
Curiously enough, Tricia's next msg introduced a little bit of the Dalai
Lama's thinking. In fact, I have discovered very recently some of the
ideas of what we might call the «Tibetan Buddhist psychology». According
to some studies in the last 2 decades of the last century, people began to
realize that the Tibetan Buddhist psychology was a very well structured
and valuable science of the spirit which was based in thousand of years of
thorough studies.
True compassion in t.b.p., as far as I could grasp, is achieved through
many years of work in meditation, study and relaxation. Through that work,
if one is lucky and determined, one can shed away egotistic needs and
feelings, shed away the basic, very animal, very human paradigm of the
self vs. the rest. For t.b.p., it seems that the whole psychological and
psychoanalytical process of the west leads us only to an incomplete
development. Freud once said that his work was to transform neurotic
suffering in ordinary unhappiness. T.b.p. seems to be able to get to
several levels above this. To happiness. To true compassion.
The thing is, in my view, it is unrealistic and counter-productive to
overachieve in this process. We are very-very-very far from compassion.
Maybe only our great-great-grandchildren could even be able to get there
without a life of retreat in Tibet. We aren't even ready to have, most of
us, a life without a neurosis! We shouldn't be trying to jump over the
process and get to the end without running the mile. Aiming for
compassion, in this day and age is, IMHO, far from being realistic. What
we would get is a rather fallible and destructive mockery of the concept.
What we may do, I think, is to start and walk the path. Maybe by following
sage advice like the one of the Dalai Lama, maybe trying to understand how
we feel and... well... feeling.
I promise I'll return to you soon.
Love,
Bruno
--"Bruno Martins Soares" <bmartins.soares@mail.EUnet.pt>
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